I love debates, so I bring this to your attention: it's likely to cause mixed reactions. It's something that might become very important during the course of the 21st century, though few people talk about it right now.

Some people say that world-wide birth control will one day be necessary to ensure long-term survival of Mankind, because the Earth is not able to sustain the current population growth for very long. I must admit I kind of agree with them: it's almost certain that one day (though not necessarily today), we will need to stabilize then decrease the human population to keep our planet fit for the following generations. I'm sure it will happen sooner than expected, maybe in only a few decades.

Here is the website of Optimum Population Trust, a controversial British organization that brings some fairly good arguments in favor of a decrease of human population.

Some people are shocked by what they say: birth control is a bit of a taboo subject, even amongst hard-core tree-huggers. But personally I think it makes sense. If the Earth is not even able to sustain the current population right now, then eventually something will inevitably have to be done to control birth in the near future. When the very survival of Man is at stake, we must think long-term.

Any thoughts?

I'm not sure where birth control is a taboo subject, and certainly not in my experience of hardcore tree-huggers. Nearly every liberal friend of mine (bit of a tautology there) is fully behind the idea of birth control, and most support the idea of planet-wide control measures.

Some, a few, even advocate killing all the stupid people.

That would sure reduce the population a lot.

I can understand, though, why some conservative people are shocked by this new idea. Some wouldn't like being told that they can have no more than X children. And pro-life people would say it will cause even more abortions, though this problem can be resolved by simply promoting contraception.

What gets on my nerves is right-wing people calling all long-term thinkers tree-huggers. There's a big difference between the two: a tree-hugger is one who wants to save the rainforest because "forests are beautiful" or because "forests are the home of a lot of cute animals", while a long-term thinker is one who wants to save the rainforest because those forests produce the oxygen we breathe and filter our polluted air.

...

I've never encountered that. Environmentalists, yes. 'Long-term thinkers'? I don't think that's even an acknowledged political group.

And if the right are guilty of caricature, the left is equally so. Gun-totin' redneck creationist hillbillehs, anyone?

Well... Long-term thinkers are also environmentalists.

As opposed to those who want to live as comfortably as possible without caring about the following generations.

Worldwide birth-control is a radical solution, but one day we will definitely have to be radical. The intention in environmentalism is not to save the whales, it's to preserve for our sons and daughters the only world humans can live in.

How about the environmentalists that are so reactionarily 'grass-roots' that they stridently oppose nuclear fission, GM crops, and so on, and genuinely do believe that environmentalism is about saving the whales? I have an aunt like that. She sees humanity as a kind of plague, and an environmentalists' duty to try reduce the damage we do to the world around us (which is of course wonderful and lovely), not to try and preserve it for ourselves.

I would not call myself an environmentalist, but I would call myself a 'long-term thinker' (although I'm sure there must be a better phrase for that). I don't see a future in trying to cling on to the environment we've got - we're going to have to roll with the change, while still trying to steer it to avoid it being change towards an environment that is completely hostile to civilisation. I support GM crops and intensive farming (in moderation) and fission power (completely). The word 'environmentalist' is tarred with the brush of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and I want nothing to do with them.

It seems to me that you're drawing very sharp boundaries, and then dividing all political opinion along those black-and-white lines.

I'd personally argue that trying to prevent the extinction of species 'unecessary' is more than just 'clinging to the enviroment we've got'. Particularly not if it can be avoid by changes in our own civilisation.
Gm crops I'm not opposed to, certainly not their existence, although my anti-big business streak does make me bridle at the mass comercialisation of agriculture. Still, if it saves lives I can't complain.


Anyhow, I fully and completely support world-wide birth control. If we want to survive, to 'roll with the change' we're going to have to change our society to adapt with it. This may seem at odds with my above statement, but I feel that population reduction can be achieved without condemning living people to a painful death. The problem though is that our current economies do rely on growth, which mean an increasing labour force. I think this is also where a lot of the opposition comes from, a shrinking population means a change in how our society functions and if there's one that makes most people uneasy it's change.

You completely sure of that?

What value, other than sentimental value, does the survival of pandas have? We don't eat them. They're not domesticatable. They're not a significant link in the food chain. And it's an uphill struggle to keep them alive.

I have no objection to people deciding they want to save the pandas (it's their money, and a free world... well, most of it), but I myself see no reason to preserve them, other than as exhibits in zoos.

Maybe we need Municipal Darwinism. That way, we could not only recycle our resources, but also escape the rising sea levels by moving away on giant, forest-crushing caterpillar tracks, and looking reaaaaallly cool.

Link, for those who don't work in a childrens' bookshop.

Yeah, but eventually the guy in charge of London is going to go mad with power and recreate supremely powerful weaponry with the view of conquering the planet and converting it into a fre-roaming space object devouring other worlds.
(yeah, I've been reading the series since Mortal Engines came out. Excellent sicence fiction, especially given that it's a debut series).

Yeah, I am. From my own personal morality, minimizng the damage to the other beings that make up the biosphere of this fragile little blue-green dot we call home is of extreme importance. We are responsible for a great deal of declining species and extinctions, most of which are completely unecessary as we are perfectly capable of surviving comfortably without destroying countless other species. Regardless of whether they're cute or not, needless slaughter and habitat destruction are not something I can reconcile with my own feelings.

True from a pure self-interest value, there may not be much to gain, but what do we gain, other than satisfaction, from fictitious literature, or cinema, plays, hell even Games Workshop hobbies? Lots of things human's treasure serve no practical use. I wouldn't say that makes them worthless.

What Spire said. And, except for where they disagree, what Chilipepa said. I don't have issues with (safe) nuclear power, which means that nuclear power in our post-Chernobyl world is generally okay. Folk who whine about the evils of nuclear energy don't realise how environmentally damaging wind farms can be, or how much worse traditional (coal, oil) power stations are.

I don't think nuclear energy should be the Final Solution. It too uses a finite natural resource, and we can only store the waste in so many locations, and these locations are also finite. We need to find another solution. But as a stop-gap measure? No one has offered anything better...yet.

I'd also like to distance myself from some of the Far Left. The Socialist Alliance in Australia, with their relentless opposition to capitalism and the industrialised "West" do nothing useful aside from piss off liberal folk and further alienate moderate lefties from the Right. I'd also like to point out that every single communist experiment has utterly failed and that the standards of living in Nepal are not great. If these idiots have a problem with the West, they can either try to do something about it in an intelligent manner or piss off.

Ahem.

Mind, I would consider humanity to be scarcely more than a plague. While Darwin or Chilipepa here or Umberto Eco are intelligent, creative people worth preserving, the vast majority of humanity are worthless, spineless creatures seeking only self gratification. Blerch. Having said that, I don't (seriously) advocate mass genocide, or the like. Birth control? Yes. Preservation of species and their habitats? Yes. Space exploration/colonisation? Yes.

Saving the whales? Yes.

The pandas? Yes. At least, saving them from damage caused by us.

But at the same time, I don't think we should focus on saving the charismatic megafauna. Pandas are nice, but so are Queensland Lungfish and other Endangered Ugly Things. Too many environmentalists and 'tree-huggers' focus on wolves and pandas and humpbacks, but immense extinction occurs amongst the small ugly things as well. It is hypocritical to scrub oil only off penguins.

This is the least organised post I've ever written. Ah well.

That would be OK, London's a great place.

That series has a great ending, although I'd say Philip Reeve is one of the worst abusers of the Hollywood Shield I have ever read.

'Needless'? Are the people destroying the pandas' habitat doing it on a whim? What about the economic reasons?

Hm. From mine, the survival of our species comes first, all the other species come in at 100th place. As such, I don't see it as viable to lavish funds on saving an animal which is pretty much an evolutionary cul-de-sac anyway (come on, a bear who only eats bamboo, that's not exactly a recipe for success) when there is still critical global poverty and even more critical global warming to deal with is a vast misappropriation of money. Species have gone extinct throughout the course of history - you don't owe it to pandas to keep their species alive any more than you owe it to a dog to keep that particular dog alive, or make that particular dog have children, as your acts and our general altruistic morality are centred around individuals, not species.

It's kind of like the abortion argument. You harm no-one by letting an unimportant species go extinct, because those potential future pandas aren't ever going to come into existence to complain about it.

Personal enjoyment. Which is the rationale for preserving our species in the first place - so that you and other humans will live life to the full. If you get personal enjoyment, or fulfillment, or call it what you will, out of saving pandas, I'm not stopping you, as I said in my previous post: it's your money, you're free to do as you will with it. But I don't recognise it as a moral imperative - it's your personal preference. I, personally, wouldn't like to let whales go extinct, I think they're wonderful and it would be sad to let them go. But that is based around my appreciation of them, not their 'right' to survive as a species - since I do not have that same appreciation of pandas, I will not act to preserve them.

Perhaps unecessary would have been a better term. Many cases of habitat destruction could be avoided simply by reducing the demands that lead to them or by filling said demends through other means (worldwide birth control aids in the former). For me thought, conservation isn't just about individual species but various ecosystems as a whole. It's worth noting that a lot of medicinal drugs (real medicine, not homeopathy) have come from the natural world.

As for pandas, if you don't feel a personal need to prevent their extinction then fair. I'm not interested in forcing my own personal morality on anyone. I would say that I do place humans higher than other indiviual species in importance, but when it comes to ecosysytems or the biosphere itself then humans do drop down somewhat.


I'm also with Benedictus on nuclear power, simply because utilising it along with the other methods the only way we're stand a chance of mitigating our dependance on fossil fuels at the present. World wide birth control is certainly essential, I'd say, since currently there just aren't enough resources in the world to support our current usage in the long term, let alone the consumption that would result from elevating all those in poverty to a comfortable standard of living. With a large reduction in our species' size brought-about by birth control we would at least be able to ensure that those who did live would have fairly comfortable standards without over-taxing our planet. There would still most likely have to be a reduction in the amount of reasources we consume and the amount of waste we generate, but it would certainly be a less daunting prospect than what faces us now.

On capitalism, I would argue that if it is to survive it will have to evolve. Especially as it has played a fair role in getting us into the environmental mess we're in now. The idea of continuous economic growth is unfortunately at odds with either a worldwide de crease in human population or a decrease in consumption, and it will have to change. There are other problems too, such as fostering inequality and moving power into the hands of the wealthy, but these 1) are not unique to it and 2) can hopefully be dealt with as we work towards keeping our planet habitable.

I'm pretty much with Spire and Benedictus here. Pandas might be useless, but it's worth it to go out of our way to save them. Not just because they're cute; also because the Earth does not belong to us, it is us who belong to the Earth, and we have no right to grind over our environment when all we get is a slightly more comfortable life. And while I agree that Man is by far the most important species on Earth since it is the only intelligent one, it just seems immoral to cause extinctions just in the name of Holy Economy.

I completely support nuclear power. It's far less harmful than coal or oil power and much more cost-effective than wind or sun power. But please hurry up bringing us fusion power; then we will have the power of tomorrow.

As for capitalism, I believe it is deeply flawed and clearly has a tendency towards self-destruction, but what alternative do we have? This kind of economical system can be less harmful if more tightly controlled, but we'll always have to live with it. I'll say about capitalism what Winston Churchill said about democracy: it's the worst system there is, except for all other systems that have been tried before that.

They should start terraforming Mars, too. Next time they send a robot for research, they should drop a few million cyanobacteria to produce oxygen out of the thin layer of carbon dioxide that surrounds the planet. The process will take millenia, but this way, even if we destroy the earth or all life on Earth (something we are likely to do one day, stupid as we are), life will go on someplace else.

Pshaw, sir, pshaw. How can we 'belong' to a lump of rock? Why do we need a 'right' to 'grind over the environment' (I wouldn't use such negative phrasing, of course... I would say 'exploit it to the full')?

As with a parent and child, we have no obligation to Planet Earth for bringing us forth: it was not a 'decision' (and I am making a very loose analogy here, because of course no decision-making was involved) that we had any choice in. In fact, to strain the analogy even further, 'She' has not exactly taken good care of us. The Black Death, HIV/AIDs... the biosphere has done us a great many 'wrongs' as well as favours. The fact that we could not exist without it is no more relevant than the fact that a child could not exist without their parents, even if those parents were abusive monsters: the necessity of the environment for our own survival does not obligate us towards it any more than is necessary to preserve it for that purpose. I for one hold the fervent hope that humanity will out-live the biosphere.

Also... if the Earth doesn't belong to us, why should we interfere at all? I'd lay good money that even without human intervention, the pathetically ill-'designed' panda bear is on the fast track to extinction.

Really? Dolphins and Orangutans aren't intelligent at all? I thought we'd discussed the sliding scale of intelligence somewhere before.

To be clear: my species-centric morality is not at all based on humanities' status as an intelligent species. It is based around humanity's status as the only species of which I am a member.

So long as you people in the humanities hurry up bringing us the Answer to World Peace, we'll see what we can do 'hurrying up' fusion power. It's not that easy recreating the conditions found in the heart of the Sun, you know. And then working out how to do it so that you get more energy out than you put in recreating the conditions in the first place...

Subject to a great deal of debate. There is an increasing amount of evidence that sujests we've sorely underestimated the intelligence of other animals. Our nearest relatives, the great apes, along with African Grey Parrots and several species of dolphins are reckoned to possess intelligence comparible with our own. There have been documented cases of chimpanzees learning sign language and being able to communicate with humans and understand responses, in much the same manner as we do. Similar phenomena have also been seen with Grey Parrots, using vocalised language. Calling us the only intelligent lifeforms may be pushing things a bit.

I'd say humans are the most important species on the planet simply because we have far more power over our planet than any other. Plus, it also happens to be the species I myself belong too.

Pure unfounded speculation here. There are quite a few hyper-specialised species (ant-eaters, Aard-wolves, pangolins) that have survived unchanged for millenia. As long as the prey lifeform remains, the specialist's survival is quite likely.

I meant that we are by far the most intelligent. Using sticks to capture ants, like chimps do, is something very basic: a human toddler could do the same. While such things as arts, religion, philosophical thinking and science are as far as I know concepts that only humans can understand.

Fusion power could be available in a few decades. They're about to make a big experiment about nuclear fusion, and I hope it gets good results.

But you understand that a success for ITER will just prove that it is possible, not develop the technology to anywhere near a commercially usable level?

Heh. Folks've asked before where Chili and I disagree, and I think we've found a point of friction. Goodo! I don't have time to respond just now, but I'll keep an eye on the thread and attempt to rally some arguments together.

In the meantime, humans are only the most intelligent species according to our own criteria for intelligence. I think it is incredibly species-centric to assume we are smarter than wolves, when I haven't seen you bring down a deer using only your teeth.

And Pandas were doomed to extinction eventually anyway. With this I agree. Problem is, not all species we wipe out are so doomed. The passenger pigeon, for example. The blue whale, for another. Etc, etc. The so-called Tasmanian Tiger, a beautiful carnivore that has been driven to extinction for no good reason.

I can see Chili's point Re: World Hunger. I do not, however, think that attempting to preserve vanishing ecologies impact on world poverty. I would say that multi-billion dollar movies impact poverty. Grain dumping. Wasteful harvesting practises, that sort of thing. Channeling funds towards helping the third world and towards preventing extinction would be more or less mutually compatible.

If there comes a particular location where one would have to give way to the other, THEN we can have an argument about a scale of importance. But I think that while neither are receiving sufficient funds or energy, it is better to move slowly towards both.

Feel free to disagree, of course. My argument stems from the (unsupported, as I've no time to look it up) fact that there is sufficient food currently in production* to feed the entire planet comfortably. Given this is true, world poverty hunger could vanish and we could concentrate on rebuilding ecosystems. This would also have the benefit of repairing some of the climate damage, I think. Everybody wins.


*Or we have the resources to put it into production; arable land, available workers, etc. Something like that. Like I said, I can't look it up right now. Ethiopia is a byword for famine, when it should be the breadbox of Africa.

As an aside, this would be a lot easier with genetically engineered crops, as long as we don't do anything insane like design crops unable to breed or something. So inefficient.

The problem is that all 'super crops' are sterile. This is so that they don't dominate the ecosystem and wipe out 'natural' crops, and of course so that the creators can keep selling seeds.

Also, I too disagree with chilli. There are reasons to protect animals beyond money value. For example: in the future it is likely humanity will want to play god a little: create our own creatures using DNA from existing creatures. The more animals alive, the more options we'll have: what if we kill the pandas then 100 years later realise they have the vital gene we need.

Additionally, we need to draw a line somewhere. It's nice to say we don't need to protect the panda, but it sets a precedent to keep raping the environment until the Earth becomes a sphere of asphalt or something.

Finally, even economically a lot of species need protecting. Fish for example: if there were no laws restricting fishing, it is quite likely the fish would disappear completely: and then we cannot fish any more :S

However, in the end there's really no reason not to protect things. It's not devastating to fence off areas of a country to protect native conditions.

I think it is reasonably impartial to say that we are orders of magnitude more intelligent than every other species on the planet, on the simple basis of one fact: we have gone, in a vanishingly small space of geological/evolutionary time, from being roughly 0.2% of the world's vertebrate biomass on land and in the air, to being or owning 98% of that biomass.

Wolves can do a lot of things, but they don't rule the world. We do. That is why in the European battle of wolves vs. humans that took place over the last couple of centuries, the score was Humans 10⁹⁸¹, Wolves 0, and why you don't see the tamed and subjugated ancestors of humans trotting behind their lupine overlords, but you do see domesticated wolves (aka dogs) giving slavish obedience to human masters. The same can be said about any other macroscopic species you care to name. We've even managed to deliberately bring some pathogens to extinction.

Of course I acknowledge this point, and of course I do not like it when species become extinct through our actions for no good reason. However, as I'm going to point out, I think that the criteria environmentalists set up for something having 'no good reason' are far too harsh.

Here's the problem: everyone in this topic has been basing their 'policies', if you like, around principle. About what could be done in theory. But the truth is that, as you all say, humans may be successful (which I'm proud of, even if others liken us [and themselves] to a plague), but we're not very nice as a species. You won't get the movie industry to up sticks and go and donate all its money to solving the crises in Africa. You won't be able to stop some farmers doing what is profitable at the expense of feeding the hungry, particularly the biggest farm syndicates that have the most pressure on them to make the most profit they can. State regulation can help (you can cap the ridiculous salaries that premiership footballers get paid, create initiatives to move surpluses around more effectively, raise taxes, and put your increased revenue into the worthy causes you're trying to help), but unless you're drawing an immense amount of political strength from some other issue, in a democratic, capitalist society, the people will vote you out when you hurt their wallets. Or else they'll never vote you in in the first place.

Organisations like Greenpeace, WWF, and Friends of the Earth, however, draw on the money that people donate because of their charitable instincts: the money that they do not object to losing. It's the first source of revenue for this kind of project, and while I'd strongly disagree with neo-libs who say that it should be the only source of revenue, it's clear to me at least that the problems we have in world poverty deserve far more attention than they get. One of the big reasons for this has to be market saturation: there are so many choices as to where to put your money when you decide to give money to charity, and so many of them make their issue 'the' problem with the world today (and the big environmental NGOs are especially guilty of this), that it's hard to see the little match-girl dying of pneumonia in the snow for all the street urchins clamouring for your spare change.

You may say that people don't give money to charity like that: that they give money to people they support, they don't look at the 'market' of charities and then decide who their money is best placed with. I believed that too, up until a couple of years ago, when some conversations with my (right-wing) politics teachers prompted me to ask around on the subject. I was very surprised at the number of people who see their charitable donations as "giving something back" to society, and have a charity "budget" which comes before they decide who they're giving it to. Even if I'm wrong, however, the environmental NGOs' constant propaganda campaigns can hardly be helping to give an impartial picture of who deserves your money most.

Here's the thing: maybe you're right, for now, but the title subject of this topic should tell you that if you are, you're not going to stay right for very long. The reason I've been staying out of the birth control discussion is the same reason I stated earlier: I don't believe it has the political means to happen, even if it is the right thing to do (which I probably incline towards saying it is). If you try to restrict the number of children people can have, you will get the same kind of reaction that we Dawkinsites (heh) get when we say that children should be freed of the religion of their parents - "How dare you, an outsider, tell me what to do with my children?" You just have to look at China to see how 'successful' state-enforced birth control is... and China is a totalitarian nation. Could a party with mandatory birth control as a platform get voted into power in a Western democracy? I think the Monster Raving Loonies would get more votes.

The population is growing at an exponential rate. At some point, it's going to hit the point where we don't have enough planet to feed everyone, and then things will sort themselves out - unpleasantly, yes, through starvation and inequality, but there's very little we can do to stop it, except stepping up the technological race to get more out of less, and looking for other habitats that we can inhabit. Since interplanetary colonisation is still solely the preserve of science fiction at this stage, and will remain so for quite some time, that means that we are going to have to increase our reserves of farmland. And we can't just conjure square miles out of nowhere - we're going to need to cut down trees, drain swamps and fill lakes to do that.

Habitat destruction is not 'needless'. Sometimes it is over-the-top: slash-and-burn in the Amazon, for example, is incredibly wasteful, and the cattle they put to graze over the remains of the forest are by far from being the most efficient method of using that land (quite apart from how they contribute to global warming, which I would class as the other Big Problem which needs our immediate and focussed attention). But we destroy these animals' habitats because we need them. You can't grow maize on a jungle, you can't plant cabbages in a swamp. And while with the aid of GM crops and intensive farming we can get more out of the land we already have, it's still not going to be enough in 10 years' time even if it is enough right now.

Furthermore, you don't consider the main problem with food: that it goes off. As I said, maybe we do have enough food production the whole world over to feed the population at the present time. But how are you going to get the EU's infamous milk lakes and butter mountains to people starving in favelas in Brazil? How much more expense is that going to take, and how much more emissions is it going to produce, than actually clearing the land to grow it in Brazil?. And when you get there, even if you do your best to refrigerate it, how much of your cargo will you have lost? And who will you find who will pay the exorbitant expense of this operation? Charitable donations? Shame that they're already stretched so thin, eh....?

So therefore it is clearly in our self-interest to preserve fish stocks. I don't understand the problem. Of course I do not advocate ignoring the plight of species on which we rely.

Well, that's rather a far-fetched concern, but here's two solutions for you:
1. When there's, say, one panda left, sequence its genome and extract a genetic sample. Freeze this sample and keep it in a storage bank. You now have the resources to clone pandas should you need them, and a complete record of all its genetic information.
2. What's to say in 100 years that we will not be able to synthetically engineer any gene we need? DNA is a molecule, like any other, and we can already synthesise many molecules. It may well be that in the future, our dependence on the natural world for biological agents will wither away.

As I said, the purpose of preserving the human species is so that individual humans can lead the happiest lives possible. If exploitation of the environment made the world a misery to live on, then the principle of 'humans first' would clearly have been abused, the point would have been entirely missed. If the world literally became a sphere of asphalt, then the principle of 'humans first' would have been ignored, as we clearly can't survive on a planet like that. Not unless we have used technology to update our bodies and drastically change our biological needs.

But if I had to choose between some lush, verdant, environmentalist's dream-world with no humans on, and a muddy Philip Reeve wasteland with humans? The latter. Every time.

What about the eminently reasonable reason of feeding the world, which I have expanded upon above?

Yes, I am in favour of preserving as much as we can, in order to allow us to see and enjoy these things for as long as possible. I've already stated that I'd hate to see whales become extinct. But 'as much as we can', in my view, is defined by taking the sum total of the world's surface area, subtracting as much as humans need for themselves (while being as efficient in our use of it as possible, of course), and then seeing what's left.

That's a matter of perspective. I'll address the points in closer detail in a moment, but suffice it to say that (particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries) excessive land-clearing was done in the newly colonised parts of the world- far more than was required just for infrastructure and farming purposes. A great deal of habitat was unnecessarily destroyed, and lots of topsoil was lost due to the removal of the systems that kept such things in place.

Put another way, parts of Australia would be a lot more fertile if we knew then what we do now about how ecosystems work. Clearing the trees away from arable land to increase the range for sheep farming and grain meant that the first heavy rains which came along annihilated the topsoils, rendering the land useless. It's happening in Central Asia, I think, in Kasakhstan and the like as lakes shrink and land is developed for money-making monocultures like cotton. [I think. Like I said somewhere else, my reading on this was mostly done years ago.]

When thinking along these lines, the destruction of much habitat has been for 'no good reason,' even if that knowledge comes with hindsight. All the more reason to prevent it from occurring in the future, in locations which haven't gained our expensive knowledge.

Well, yes. Even when I studied science, I was always an ivory tower kind of chap.

Having said that, you have a very good point. It's one I've made myself many, many times. Especially:

This is why I despise the Far Left. They do not seem to understand these things, and constantly push for socialism/communism* and major, widespread changes. They do not understand that in order to make changes, one must move slowly, acclimating people to the change. The homosexual movement did not become (mostly) accepted overnight. Women's Rights is still ongoing, after beginning before the turn of the previous century. It took twenty years for Animal Testing of commercial products to be so reviled that it almost entirely gone.

Things must move slowly, yet some of these people want overnight change to a democratic, worker's-run communistic government that spends all of its money on saving the animals and living a vegan, preservative-free lifestyle.**

While I am all for improving matters, and a great fan of dissent, no-one will vote for being uncomfortable. People want their comforts and their lifestyles unaltered, and want options to manage their guilt that doesn't terribly alter these things.

Which is why small changes help. The increase (in Australia) of people paying the surcharge for 'green energy,' which goes towards research and supplementary ecofriendly power stations is good. The massive funds spent on charities (which you address, and I'll get to). Mainstream political parties, left and right alike, who need to include Green policies to encourage those further from centre to send the preferences their way.***

I am not advocating widespread change. Well- I am. But I'm not expecting it to happen. I'm pointing out the problems, and advocating small incremental changes towards fixing them. There is the beginnings of a movement in Hollywood to create films with an ecological footprint of zero. More people are turning their rosegardens into vegetable gardens. Etc, etc.

It probably will never be enough, though. And I suspect we'll find that out soon enough. In the meantime, though, they are steps that help and do not require widespread, major political change.

I would agree with you wholeheartedly. In my personal scale of priorities, world poverty comes before animal/environmental concerns. As you later acknowledge, they do bleed together at the edges, though.

This is why, when I donated to charity while working full-time, I sent money first to Oxfam, (which in Australia doesn't do the taking-clothing-and-giving-it-away thing, but only the overseas work) and then to the Wilderness Society. The latter isn't one of the 'big NGOs" you mention, but an Australian company where most of the money goes to 'local' concerns. [It can only be so 'local' when you have an entire continent to play with, but you get the idea.]

I also only donate time to Oxfam, by volunteering. I'd go into a long rant why, but it would be about capitalism and Free Trade as opposed to Fair Trade and ensuring that people you give aid to become self sufficient and blah blah blah tangent. My point is that I am in TOTAL AGREEMENT with you here, and it's something I have ranted against before. I thought I might have been one of the few who noticed.

I only had (have) so much time/money to spend on charitable concerns, and I need to prioritise them. Along this line of thought, incidentally, is that one should note:

a) How much of the dollar (pound, euro) actually gets to the people in need/environment and how much gets spent on administrivia (advertising, corporate offices/CEO's cars). [Oxfam, for example is one of the better ones. World Vision, on the other hand, is one of the worst. Do not donate to WV.]

B) The policies of the organisation. There are several religious organisations which are staffed by absolutely wonderful people and do great works. There are several religious organisations which will only provide support to those of their religion- going so far as to deny aid to those of another, or forcing conversions on people. Or using your money to proselytise rather than help people. Beware.

Now I'm all distracted by my tangent, and have forgotten my point.

Oh yes! Saturated market, only so many concerns, etc.

For the record, I've been long aware of the 'only so much money budgeted to donate' thing. Like I said, I volunteered with a charity for a long, long time. Interestingly, many such people are religious, but others are secular. Both groups tend to regard it as a 'tithe'.

Yes.

I don't disagree. Thing is, how will such a world look any different to the one we are currently in? People dying on a massive level of starvation and disease, militias controlling the streets, governments brutally and cynically mass murdering people? That is a succinct, if somewhat bitter, description of large parts of Africa and Asia, including Southeast Asia.

My point is that we currently could feed the world. Well, I think so. Assuming that is true, if we looked towards fixing our current problems, neither the destruction of habitat and the extinction this causes nor the worldwide poverty and degradation would be issues. Eventually they would be, but by then we might be able to come up with a plan. Or intensify the lands we do have -I'll get to that- or put pills in the water or outlaw having children without a license or something.

Hell, we might even need to then sacrifice habitats for human farmland/housing. At least at such a point we will know it is necessary and we can cynically maximise our efficiency such that common animals will become less so while endangered ones do not become worse. Might be tricky, mind, especially with migratory types.

P'raps a Highway for Wolves?

But I digress.

You point out, rightly enough that you can't grow cows on a jungle, or whatever. Thing is, rainforest soil is the worst kind of soil to grow in. It has almost no nutrient value whatsover- it is quite barren, compared to a river delta or what have you. The reason the trees grow so big and green and juicy in a rainforest is because of all that lovely decaying matter at the bottom and has nothing to do with the soil.

Took Australian farmers a while to figure that one out.

Along this line of thought, our current farming practises are terribly inefficient. I've touched on it in vegetarian/animal rights threads before, but energy is vastly wasted by eating it from an animal. A simplified diagram follows:

Grass [10, 000 units of energy] ==> Cow [1,000 uoe] ==> Human [100 uoe]

Of course it's not a ratio that's that simple, but you get the idea. Now let's take a peek at fish:

Sea grass [100, 000] ==> Planktony thing [10, 000] ==> Small fish [1, 000] ==> Bigger fish [100] ==> Fish wot we eat [10] ==> Human [1]

Eating fish is ecologically unsound. Eating a tuna, which eats a fish which eats a fish, which -look, I don't know how far down it goes- is as inefficient as eating a tiger, or a lion or another human. Eating a cow isn't much better.

It is far more efficient to live on a vegetarian diet in terms of simple energy loss, but also take into account the amount of land wasted. A cow, which is already inefficient, takes up much more land than the same 'energy amount,' as it were, of grains or vegetables or spinaches or what have you.

If anyone even attempts that ridiculous argument about humans being 'designed' to eat meat, or 'requiring' it, or that eating meat gives you bigger brains, please don't waste your time. The only one I would even remotely consider a good argument is the one about omega oils in fish, and you can get those oils from various plants anyway.

So in terms of maximising world food production, there are solutions we could take that do not involve demolishing rainforest to no appreciable gain.

When the world we live in does not have Italian almonds being exported to California and Californian almonds being exported to Italy, this argument would hold water. But as it is, Australian bananas are cheaper in Denmark than they are in Brisbane and I can buy Danish feta cheese in my local deli. It's ~$13/kg.

Frankly, I don't know why haven't already done this. If we can create a library of vanishing species, it will ease the pain of the loss and make it easier to reconstruct the poor buggers in the future. I'm not saying it's a solution -it isn't- but it would certainly help.

Not to say I don't agree with you, but this is a sliding scale argument, which isn't really going to parse. Sorry, man.


I think I had something else to say at the end here, but I forget what it was. So it goes.

Cheers.



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*They really don't seem to understand the difference. We live in a socialist country in Australia -free nationwide healthcare, government subsidised tertiary education, a government welfare program which caters for students, the unemployed and the severely disabled, a decent war veterans program, etc- and yet they push for a 'socialist revolution' and so forth. Idiots.

**Not all of them want all of these things. But the few that do are very vocal, and tar everyone left of Genghis Khan with the same sticky brush in the eyes of the conservative Right.


***If this sentence makes no sense to anyone, ask me and I'll explain the basics of the Australian voting system. It's not very complicated, but not really at home here.

Like I said, I’m no advocate for doing it badly. When we’ve already taken up so much of the best farming territory, it’s foolish to start grabbing more, sub-standard land before you’ve set up a system to ensure you get the maximum out of what you already have. But as with nuclear power, the mistakes of the past are not a reason to bury that method twenty feet deep and pretend it never existed: they are lessons to learn from and improve upon.

And if you really want someone to blame for the situation in Khazakstan, with the Aral sea and everything, Soviet centralism is more your man. Putting the control of farming in the hands of control-freak communist bureaucrats is usually not a good idea. Again, we have the handy parallel with Chernobyl.

Although, of course, it is also Gav Thorpe's fault.

Hindsight’s a marvellous thing, isn’t it? But let me put a different spin on it for you. We thought we were doing it for a good reason, and we were. But we did it wrong, and as such, we may as well have done it for no reason at all. Hence, when we do it again, we must learn from our mistakes and do it right, not abandon it altogether.

As for locations which haven’t gained the knowledge gained in Australia or elsewhere: well, that’s the wonderful thing about living in a global society, with the interweb and everything. Soon (well, now, really), we will be able to transfer agricultural lessons learned in southern Argentina to Vladivostok, to allow experts in Edinborough to chat with experts in Auckland. There is no excuse for hiding behind the “oh, but it didn’t happen here” excuse any more.

Look at it from the mathematical perspective. Right now, you have X amount of food, unevenly distributed, and Y degree of poverty/starvation, again unevenly distributed. Stats show that the world population is growing exponentially: again, this is uneven, with higher birth rates (slightly mitigated by shorter life expectancy) in poorer nations. X may or may not be enough to feed Y if you evened it out and administered it with 100% efficiency (or something close), we’re not sure. I’m pretty sure we’ll both of us admit that we’re not experts here. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it is, just, and that the reason for all this hunger is, for now, solely down to the uneven distribution of food resources.

Now, according to the graphs I find under ‘world population’ on Wikipedia (not too reliable I know, but this is a familiar statistic so I hope my rough-and-ready data will suffice), the population of the world has doubled between 1959 or so and 2000. The current world population is approx. 6.6 billion. Looking down the same Wikipedia article, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population), we’ll be looking at 9.4 billion people by 2050 – that’s a 50% increase in only 45 years, and it’s a low-end estimate. Barring a sudden population crash (which, I think you’ll agree, must mean many, many deaths and a world significantly worse than we have today), you have 50% more people to feed with the same amount of land, and the majority of those new people are in the poorer countries, who are already starving, and who can afford fewer technological aids to their farming methods. Do you really believe that the amount of food production resources we have at present is capable of feeding the world and half the world again? If so, where is all this food that is not reaching the hungry? Surely, with that degree of surplus, even accounting for human selfishness, inefficiency, opportunism and all those things, we would have more than enough for everyone.

It seems pretty clear from these reasonably simple numbers that Y is increasing faster than X, and that even if they are balanced now, they will not remain balanced for long. The counterweight to @ztech’s proposal of retarding the growth of Y is my proposal of accelerating the growth of X. While, as you and I have agreed, you can do this by intensifying your farming and introducing GM crops that give you a higher yield over the same surface area, I really doubt that you will be able to make a 50% increase in 45 years solely with the land you have. Particularly as the places that will need that increase the most will be the ones where it is hardest to deploy these technological fixes¹. And even if, miraculously, we were to manage this, will you keep intensifying and intensifying until eventually you need to develop some technology to squeeze the atoms in maize closer together so that you can grow more crops in the same space? There has to be a limit to how much nutrition you can get out of a given area of land, but there is no upper limit to the population: we don’t know when or if it’s going to plateau off. And we definitely want a plateau, not a crash. Until we can achieve that, we have to keep pace – and that means not only intensifying, but expanding our resources of farmland.

So how would the world be different? Well, neutral scenario, you’ll have 50% more people, and over half of them will be starving. More hunger and poverty means more wars, more conflict, more intense squabbling over resources. No matter how bad things may be in some places right now, there’s always room for them to get worse.

There are telling words in this paragraph. “Current” problems. “Currently” we could feed the world (which I’d still like to see some data regarding, although I’m too lazy to find it myself). “Eventually” they would be a problem. This is the same attitude that has got us into our current screwed-up state with global warming.

@ztech’s initial point about ‘long-term thinking’ comes in here. When the problem comes along, it’s not a problem you can ‘fix’. You need to have the infrastructure to supply the food in place before the hunger it is there to placate becomes a critical problem, and it takes a long time to build. If you only react to it when it happens, then you may as well not have acted at all: all those people are going to die before you can get the food to them anyway.

As for outlawing having children without a license/putting pills in water: well, for that you’re going to need a totalitarian state. Good luck with that, Mr History Student.

I find this argument highly suspect.

Number 1: where do you get that divide by ten figure? Conservation of energy and mass implies to me that all that remainder must be going somewhere. If, as in farming, we are controlling the food chain, could it not be going to something we are also going to eat? Of course, a lot is going to be spent making the cow move around and such, but that seems highly dependent on the cow's 'lifestyle' and the individual cow. 'Divide by 10' seems a lot too clean-cut for something that variable.

Number 2: You miss out on the roles of converters. Let’s assume your divide by ten statistic is true. Now a sheep, or a cow, eats grass. When we eat the cow or the sheep, we get a tenth of the energy that we would get if we just ate the grass. But eating the grass makes us throw up. We may not be ‘designed’ to eat meat, but we are definitely not designed to eat grass. As opportunistic omnivores, our digestive systems are set up to process high-energy ‘packaged’ foods, like fruit, roots, nuts and other animals, not the kind of foods that grazers eat. A cow spends most of its day eating that grass: we may only get a tenth of the energy out, but we only have to spend an hour or so eating the cow.

Similarly, we cannot eat plankton, or algae, or sea grass. The reason that natural selection has led to food chains is because they are more efficient than everyone competing for the bottom-level energy source. It’s a problem we have to deal with: we’re one of the very few species that has begun to proliferate in numbers larger than the organisms directly beneath it in the food chain.

All this being said: yes, stop the burger chains wasting so much land in South America for cattle. There is already an excellent soy industry growing there. Focus on the highest energy-for-land-available foods we can. But a vegetarian world isn’t going to work, unless you plan to scour all inhabited land of inedible plant life and replace it with maize.

And will this yield you a 50% increase in food production in 45 years? Or will you have to both intensify and expand, as is my argument?

Furthermore, you have the political reality to deal with again. People won’t give up their comforts: luxury foods must be somewhere in the top 10 of those. And personally, I don’t condemn them for this: as I said, the point of all this species-survival morality is so that people can lead fulfilled lives. A miserable life on soybean rations doesn’t fit those criteria.

So you want to change this industry from being a transporter of luxury foods between rich Western countries to being a transporter of bulk subsistence foods between most nations the world over, when the industry is already a huge carbon offender.

The starving in Bangladesh will certainly be thanking you when the food shipments come in. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to hear them, because they’ll all be underwater. As will many of the low-lying farms you were planning to ship your food from.

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1: This is not to mention the problem of selling sterile supercrops to poor nations. Personally, I’d say de-sterilise them. Who the hell cares if different strands of grass or corn die out and are replaced by better strands of grass (apart from Friends of the Earth, who frankly make it worth doing just to piss them off)? Plus, as species engineered for a pampered life under a farmer’s protecting hand, there is absolutely no guarantee that GM species of this vein could out-compete wild species. I’m willing to bet that something designed to grow in a field and give the maximum nutrition when eaten is not going to flourish on a savannah or similar, where its aims should be to grow in any conditions it can and avoid being eaten. The only advantage I can think of them using in that context is resistance to pests. And even if I’m wrong, what have we lost? Wild animals will even get more nourishment from eating the new grass.

Well, there is the fact that often when humans have introduced a non-native species into an environment the results have been disasterous. The rabbits and cane toads in Australia are just two infamous examples of what can happen if we start 'improving on' the diversity of local lifeforms. For instance, if pest resistent plants start to flourish then the 'pests' themselves start to decline. This can then impact on the creatures that prey on the pests and the creatures that prey on those and so on. Ecosystems can be surprisingly fragile, especially once you start messing around with the food web.

'Doing the right thing' and 'not doing something again' are not always opposed. In this case, rainforest soil is poor for farming, so that if agricultural land is needed then 'doing it right' would mean not using rainforest land for agricultural farming, but finding an alternative.

Granted, but you don't hear about the ones that don't have an impact, because they die out swiftly.

It seems to me that it would be relatively simple to engineer GM crops that were uncompetitive outside of an agricultural environment, and thus would not be able to push 'native' species out of nearby wildernes areas.

Or possibly studying the reasons that the rainforest land is poor agricultural land, and taking steps to change the make-up of the land we reclaim from the forest before we farm it?

Of course, use the poor land last. But when you have to use it (as you do in Brazil, where there is precious litle unforested land to be had except that which has been reclaimed from the Amazon), use it and use it right.

I'll respond to these points later. Firstly, though, the ratio of 10 was pulled from my arse. I said the ratio wasn't that simple, and it isn't. It's just used to demonstrate what I mean by energy loss. A decimal system is the easiest way to explain it for me, that's all.

As for the lost energy, that goes into maintaining said animal. Fish need a fair bit of energy to swim about, and they use most of it up before we eat it. Or something. I'm not an ecologist.

I wasn't advocating eating the grass, but rather eating grass equivalents. Grains, soybeans, spinach: that sort of thing. Swap out the inedible grass we're wasting and replace it with things that are not only edible, but more efficient. While this system would not work if humans were carnivorous, we are not. We are omnivores, capable of living on nothing but grains, vegetables and fruit. While meat is delicious, we don't need it to live.

This also isn't to say that we can't keep small-scale farms. You wanna eat cow? Fine, but the price goes up because of how land intensive it is. Considering that Japan manages to find land to grow luxury-class cows, I don't think our future dystopia will find it so difficult. Given that you are advocating maximum efficiency, this is clearly a better option than wasting arable land on meat farms.

And for the record you can make meat substitutes very easily from soy and the like. Head down to your local supermarket and you can find vegetarian bacon, sausages, rissoles and even meatloaf. I would bet good money that if KFC (for example, and I'm not pushing for this) swapped to a soy alternative for chicken no one would notice.

I'll get to the rest later.

That might be true that energy is lost by eating meat, but no matter how much of an environmentalist I become, I'll never abandon honey and garlic chicken wings. ^_^

Efficiency, applied across the fields, essentially boils down to output/cost. It is costly to replace grass that is already there in abundance with fields of crops which must be re-planted and maintained. This is where crop rotation comes in, and your dairy herd/sheep/pigs start offsetting their cost by helping you keep the land fertile, too.¹

Not that I'm really arguing against this any more. As a mathematician and a physicist (with the whole conservation of mass/energy thing we like to talk about), I can see that the numbers do stack up behind what you're saying. I'm just trying to point out that it's most likely not as much of a monumental difference as you make out.²

As such, I agree that the expansion of arable crops and reduction in meat farming would be a good idea for the Efficient Future^TM. While, like @ztech, I don't want to sacrifice my carnivorous comforts, and bearing in mind that all this is for the well-being of humans, making it pointless if they have to live on iron rations in giant concrete factories, your 'luxury goods' solution is pretty much what I'd incline towards as well. Especially since the vast cattle herds of the world's fast food chains are a big contributor to the greenhouse effect, with their, erm... emissions.

Speak for yourself. I don't even know what a rissole is, let alone where to find a vegetarian one, and am quite capable of failing to see big things like 'aisle two' or speeding lorries, let alone small things like that (I'm guessing it's small... like I said, I don't know).

The thing is, would KFC bet good money on it? Because if they did, they'd be breaking the law unless they advertised it as a soya-based veggie burger (which they already sell). So either they reduce their range, and lose large amounts of customers (I have no idea as to how accurate the popular conception that soya meat substitutes don't taste right is, never having tried them, but it's a popular conception nonetheless), or they get sued for false advertising by the first lawyer with a bit of culinary know-how looking to make a name for himself, or the first kid with a soya allergy who takes a bite out of their new 'improved' burger.

Again, you run up against the iron wall of human nature in a capitalist democracy. Go directly to the poorhouse, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 Pristine Environments.

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1: Good god Tzeentch, I'm making a 'holistic' argument :blink:. On a related note, anyone watching Channel 4 next Monday will have cookies.
2: If I wasn't a pedant, I'd have no hope of completing a science degree.

Oh, KFC would never do that. And I wouldn't want them to either. [I'd like to see them treat their animals better, but that's a different conversation.] I was just pointing out that these meat substitutes are delicious.

As for a rissole, it's sort of a burger patty. That's what I meant, anyway.

Stupid regional dialecty things.